5 Minutes with…

5 Minutes with Anthony Goldbloom – Bialik Old Collegian and Founder
of Kaggle on AI and COVID-19 research

Anthony Goldbloom – Bialik Old Collegian and Founder of Kaggle on AI and COVID-19 research

At Bialik we strive to provide our children with an education that will set them up for life and help them to become the leaders of tomorrow. Anthony Goldbloom (Class of 2001) is the founder of the Google acquired business Kaggle, and has been approached by the White House to support the USA’s research efforts into the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Kaggle is a platform that allows data scientists and machine-learning specialists to create algorithms that solve complex issues for businesses, government agencies and health organisations. This platform gives way to data that would normally be untapped, bringing the hidden unknown into view. Not only does it allow data scientists access to new information, it also gives them the ability to develop their skillset further. Anthony has been listed as in Forbes ‘Top 30 under 30’ in technology and been profiled in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

The Whitehouse
engaged Kaggle among a small group of AI Technology companies to find new ways
to mine and pull the data from the 44,000 research articles on COVID-19 which
have been published globally since January 2020. The idea is that machine
learning will be able to effectively and efficiently identify patterns and
consistencies in the data available to predict the behaviour of transmission,
symptoms, incubation period and risk factors of COVID-19.

This is not the first time, the tech
giant has been engaged by US Government. Under the Obama administration Kaggle
was involved in projects that included working with NASA on mapping dark matter
and the US Census Bureau on predicting return rates for the census. I think add
the traffic example as this was really practical and easy to understand.

Bialik Vice Principal Gary Velleman said that Anthony’s passion for mathematics and thinking laterally was evident from his childhood and teenage years. Following his completion of VCE at Bialik, Anthony went on to study economics and econometrics at the University of Melbourne.

“Data science as a job title did not exist [when Anthony finished school]. Many early data scientists either came from a statistics or a computer science background”, Anthony explained.

Anthony undertook work experience including economic modelling in Australia’s Department of Treasury as well as spending time as an economist in the Research department at the Reserve Bank of Australia , it was during this time, around 2007, that the idea of Kaggle was conceived. Following an internship at The Economist in London in 2010, Goldbloom moved to Silicon Valley in 2011 to make Kaggle a reality.

In its first year, Kaggle received its first round of venture capital and from there were able to sign early customers, attract employees, and launch new products that saw it gain traction in the data science/machine-learning world. In 2017, Google acquired Kaggle in a multi-million dollar deal that facilitated an integration and balance between preserving what was fundamental and exciting about Kaggle while having powerful collaborative abilities with Google’s other teams.

Bialik is proud of Anthony’s achievements and contributions, especially at this time.

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